Bending the farming trendline

Groups across the state are working to link farmers with land in Vermont

Jul. 25, 2013

Alessandra Rellini is leasing 30 acres in Williston from the Siple Farm, a former dairy farm for four generations before the current owner, Waldo Siple sold all of his cows when the dairy business became impossible to sustain. A new program from the UVM Center for Sustainable Agriculture links landless would-be farmers with landowners looking to make their land available for farming. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

Written by

Dan D’Ambrosio

Free Press Staff Writer

Mike Betit (left) and Amanda Andrews of Tamarack Hollow Farm in Burlington on Tuesday, July 16, 2013. The farm has benefited from the Land Link Program from the University of Vermont Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The program matches farmers without land with landowners who have land they would like to be in agriculture. / GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS

Berkley Heath of Burlington works at Tamarack Hollow Farm in Burlington on Tuesday, July 16, 2013. The farm has benefited from the Land Link Program from the University of Vermont Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The program matches farmers without land with landowners who have land they would like to be in agriculture. / GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS

Alessandra Rellin installs electric fencing at Agricola Farm in Williston. Rellini is leasing 30 acres in Williston from the Siple Farm, a former dairy farm for four generations before the current owner, Waldo Siple sold all of his cows when the dairy business became impossible to sustain. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

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A few weeks ago, Alessandra Rellini loaded her 20-month-old daughter Eva into her pickup truck and went looking for a farm.

A part-time farmer, Rellini was growing desperate. She had 14 pigs, a dozen sheep, and a few hundred chickens and other birds in Hinesburg on leased land with an option to buy, but the deal didn’t work out. She couldn’t agree on a price with the owners, and now she had 30 days to move out. She had to find farmland, and fast.

Rellini came to the United States from Italy as an exchange student when she was 16 and returned to live here permanently a year later. Today she’s a psychology professor at the University of Vermont, and farms in her spare time with her husband, Charles Hubbard, director of finance and analytics at American Meadows in Williston.

She was working with a realtor to find land, and with Jon Ramsay, director of Vermont Land Trust's Farmland Access Program, but that process was going too slowly to remedy her current crisis.

“I was talking to Jon a lot and he was showing me parcels but they were mostly land that was for sale and none that worked,” Rellini said. “The parcels were way too far away and we would have had to build a house.”

Rellini and Eva began knocking on the doors of every farm they could find within a 20-mile radius from their house, looking for land and a barn. Lots of conversations went nowhere, Rellini said, but eventually she knocked on the farmhouse door of Waldo Siple. Siple had run a dairy farm on 318 acres bordering Williston for nearly 40 years, until he decided last November to sell off the 280 cows he had left.

Since then, he and his daughter Mary and farm manager Alex Goodrich had been trying to figure out their next move. As a dairy operation, the farm went $300 into the red every day.

“Unfortunately milk prices don’t pay enough to cover costs,” Goodrich said. “Once you sell your cows, how can we get the farm to pay for itself without them? One theory was to put up hay, one theory was to lease land out. Generally on big leases a farmer wants to come in and pay $40 an acre for the full farm to chop it for feed, but that doesn’t cover taxes. You try to ask for more, but the dairy farmer doesn’t have it.”

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That’s when Rellini came along and knocked on the door. Goodrich, 27, said he knew 10 minutes into Rellini’s pitch that her business plan would work.

“She’s got the passion, the heart, the love for animals,” Goodrich said. “You don’t want somebody who thinks they want to be a farmer. That doesn’t work.”

Rellini’s plan was this: She would raise pigs and slaughter them to make prosciutto, salami, pancetta and other delicious cured Italian meats. She learned how to cure meat through friends and family, and honed her skills last winter on weekends when she was living in Italy for five months on a Fulbright scholarship for research in psychology.

“I started calling friends in Italy who do cured meats, asking them how they do it,” Rellini said. “I would go and learn with some of the butchers in Tuscany.”

Rellini would also butcher chickens and lambs, along with guinea hens and quails, and milk her sheep. And every week during the summer, she would have a “farm to grill” night, offering fresh food from the farm, with local bands playing music and activities for kids, such as petting the sheep.

“It’s a way for families to enjoy Vermont and the outdoors and be connected to farms and food,” Rellini said. “We want to have a transparent approach to farming.”

Goodrich and Rellini talked about the perfect spot for the farm to grill night, in the front yard near the farmhouse and red barn, beneath the spreading branches and leaves of massive century-old maples. Waldo and Mary Siple were on board as well, and made it clear that Rellini would run her own farm without any interference.

“Mary and Waldo have always done dairy farming, so any of this stuff they don’t want to be involved,” Goodrich said. “He’s not being negative, he’s just saying, ‘You know what, I just want to sit back and watch it.’”

The Siples and Rellini reached an agreement for her to lease 30 acres of pasture for three years with an option to extend the lease another three years. Rellini will also have the use of a large barn just off South Road, down from the farmhouses.

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Agricola Farm will soon be open for business. Whimsical signs showing pigs, sheep and chickens already decorate the side of the road in front of the barn.

“We’re trying to get it out there that people who want 50 acres or 20 acres, we can work with them,” Goodrich said. “If they need barn space, we have it.”

Connecting farmers with land

All over Vermont, a variety of organizations are trying to duplicate the success Rellini had on her own with Waldo and Mary Siple — connecting people who want to farm with people who have land to farm. Jon Ramsay, director of the farmland access program at the Vermont Land Trust, maintains a list of 225 “farmland seekers.”

“What I do is I go out and look for land pretty much every which way,” Ramsay said. “I call up realtors, call up farmers, talk to allied professionals like appraisers, lawyers, anybody that deals with real estate. And I talk to people in the farm community.”

Ramsay doesn’t limit his efforts to finding farms for his list of seekers.

“We will purchase a property straight out, we did that on the Bragg Farm in Fayston,” Ramsay said.

The 50-acre Bragg Farm was “very important to the community,” Ramsay said, so the Land Trust paid $760,000 for the farm and will close this fall on a conservation easement that will maintain the property as a farm in perpetuity. Then Ramsay sold the farm for $165,000 — the value of the property conserved — to Marisa Mauro, one of the 225 farmland seekers in his database.

The Land Trust has a revolving fund for land acquisition that draws from private donors as well as local, state and federal funds and grants from foundations.

In another scenario, the Land Trust worked with David Robb and Lila Bennett of Tangletown Farm, who were juggling their operation over five different properties they were leasing. Robb and Bennett were also on Ramsay’s farmland seekers database. Ramsay doesn’t include beginners in his database, but rather looks for farmers with at least three years of “real farming experience,” who want to run a commercial operation.

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In the Tangletown case, Ramsay helped Robb and Bennett secure financing for 188 acres in Glover costing $495,000 that would allow them to consolidate their operation in one place, saving untold time and money. The couple found a private individual who financed the purchase up front with a guarantee from the Land Trust to pay back a certain portion of the loan in a certain time frame.

“What we’re trying to do is focus on the folks with the highest level of skills and highest level of overall determination,” Ramsay said. “We are talking about farming, a very difficult way to make a living with scenarios nobody can predict, like the weather. We’ve had a number of successes, but anticipate few that will fail. That’s a reasonable expectation.”

The curse of the storybook farm

Ben Waterman doesn’t have a revolving fund of money to buy land as Jon Ramsay does, but he does have a wealth of knowledge and expertise to offer at vermontlandlink.org, a sort of match.com for farm seekers and landowners. Once the match is made, Waterman said, the work has just begun.

“The most important thing in land linking is communication,” he said. “If you’re a tenant, there’s a new set of considerations. Communication can help both parties understand who will cover the costs of improvements, what’s common for landowners to cover and what’s common for farmers to handle themselves.”

Then there’s the problem of the “storybook” farm, Waterman said.

“Often the non-farming landowner doesn’t understand the change they will see,” he said. “People have a romantic view of farming. The reality of farming is it’s really tough to keep things looking like a storybook unless you’re well established. You’re going to leave messes here and there temporarily.”

The potential for conflict reaches even into basic structures that most every farmer needs.

“You wouldn’t believe it but a lot of landowners don’t like to see greenhouses even when they enter into lease agreements with a farmer,” Waterman said. “They often are shocked to see a greenhouse going up, and farmers can’t really comprehend this. It leads to the arrangement ending and the farmer moving on. It’s unfortunate but we’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen arrangement end up in court.”

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Waterman is out to end greenhouse shock. He has developed a farmland rental assessment checklist with 30 different parameters to judge business viability.

“Farmers can use this when they’re looking at a parcel, or comparing parcels,” Waterman said. “They can take all these factors into consideration, cell phone reception, have we considered how we’ll develop the water system, what’s the current output of the well? It helps everyone at the outset understand what both parties are getting into.”

The 37-year-old Waterman has been working on farms since he was 15 years old. He has worked around the world, in India, West Africa, Ghana, Costa Rica, Russia and Spain. He also spent two years in the Peace Corps, working on farms in Malawi in East Africa.

Six years ago, Waterman’s wife got a job at the University of Vermont, bringing the couple to Vermont, where they bought land in Johnson and started a small blueberry farm they now share with their two small children. It was an unexpected path for the Washington, D.C. native.

“My family is not farmers, they’re the opposite of farmers,” Waterman said. “My father is a physician. He works on Capital Hill, taking care of sick people.”

But Waterman found the appeal of farming irresistible.

“Farming is really challenging, with lots of problems to solve,” he said. “I love doing that, and just being outside. I had a knack for it too.”

Sweat equity

Ben Waterman shares a lot in common with Amanda Andrews of Tamarack Hollow Farm in Burlington’s New North End. Andrews grew up in southern New Jersey, between the Pine Barrens and Atlantic City, surrounded by high-bush blueberry fields, and chicken and pig farms.

“Now they’re all gone, all pressured from Atlantic City with McMansions and stuff,” Andrews said.

Those farms of her childhood made a strong impression on her, Andrews said, and led directly to where she finds herself today, parking a John Deere tractor with rear wheels as high as an average man’s head after rumbling up a rough dirt road from Tamarack Hollow’s vegetable fields, chicken pens and pig wallows.

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“It was part of the idyllic childhood romance thing,” Andrews said of those lost New Jersey farms. “I loved it, and realized it was going away.”

When she thought of herself at 50 or 60 years old, Andrews, 29, saw a farmer. In 2007, she quit her job at a nonprofit in Manhattan, left her hip apartment in Brooklyn and took a summer job on a farm in the Hudson Valley north of the city. The plan was to go to graduate school in the fall.

“I didn’t have debt from undergraduate school, this was going to be my last chance to satisfy this weird thing in my brain to farm,” Andrews said. “I got a job on a farm that sold at Union Square Green Market, two hours outside of New York in Orange County and fell in love with it.”

Union Square Green Market sat at the top of New York’s collection of 56 farmer’s markets, along with the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn — the most coveted spots to sell, reserved for the most accomplished farmers. Mike Betit, a pig farmer from Vermont, was also selling in Union Square, where Andrews met him. Three years later, the couple married and in 2010 she joined him at Tamarack Hollow Farm, 89.5 acres along the Winooski River across the Beltline highway, leased from landowner Theresa Tomasi.

The couple still sells vegetables and organic pork in Union Square, leaving every Wednesday at 1 a.m. in a box truck with a chest freezer packed with dry ice to arrive in New York by 6 a.m. If they oversleep and leave at 3 a.m., it takes seven hours instead of five.

The drive is grueling, Andrews says, but adds, “We wouldn’t be a farm without it.”

“Anything we produce we can sell,” she said. “At the Burlington Farmer’s Market we sell 30 bunches of kale on a good day. In New York, we sell 300 bunches.”

Tomasi, their landlord, has been “super understanding,” Andrews says, allowing the couple to make improvements to the land in lieu of making lease payments.

“When Mike came here there was no water, no electricity, no fencing,” Andrews said.

Pointing to a nearby wooded area, she says, “See the density of trees here. The whole farm was covered like that. We cleared this field up here, cut, stumped and removed trees; and brought water and electricity across the Beltline; and had to fence the whole farm.”

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Betit and Andrews meet with Tomasi every February and decide whether they should pay rent or continue improving the land. The couple also pays the taxes, which dropped from around $8,000 to about $2,600 when they started farming.

Flooded out

Despite the generous arrangement, flooding has pushed the couple to their limit. The property has the Winooski River on one side, and a large man-made pond on the other side. They’re looking for farmland again.

“This season has been the nail in the coffin on this property,” Andrews said. “In 2010, our first season here, we flooded in the spring and in November. In 2011, we had spring flooding. The lake was over our property until June. Irene hit that fall. It didn’t flood in 2012. This year, we had flooding on the pond side into the vegetables and lost a crop of potatoes. On the river side the pasture flooded frequently. We’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past five years.”

Both Waterman and Ramsay are helping Andrews and Betit in their search, along with the Vermont Farm Viability Enhancement Program, a collaboration of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and state Agency of Agriculture along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Viability Enhancement Program offers help with business planning and technical assistance, assessing a farm operation’s strengths and weaknesses.

Andrews and Betit have looked at 140 acres in Barre, and 380 acres in Berlin, which they might have been able to afford if the farmhouse hadn’t been so “lovingly restored,” Andrews said. That property was going for $800,000, out of the couple’s price range.

“It’s really hard to ask for help if you’re a farmer used to doing everything yourself,” Andrews said. “It’s really hard to admit you need help. It’s taken four years of continuous flooding to say we need help. We’ve gotten a lot of support. I wish we’d asked for it earlier.”

Waterman is keeping his eye on the big picture, noting that Vermont dropped below 1,000 dairy farms for the first time recently. The state once had 7,000 dairies. Vermont still has some of the best farmland in New England — about 1.6 million acres 30 years ago, Waterman says, compared to about 1.2 million acres today.

“If the trends of the last 30 years continue over the next 100 years the state will have no more farmland left, except however many farms are conserved,” Waterman said.

There are about 200,000 acres of farmland currently conserved in the state through easements, according to Waterman, but he expects that number to continue to grow.

“A lot of people are working on bending the trend line,” Waterman said.